Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Finally a Driveway (and a yard question)

We were happy that they finally poured our driveway today. It has been raining so much around here that they have not got to pour it. They scraped our driveway to prep it 2 weeks ago so we have been parking on the road since then. We actually even got a ticket for it! Will post a picture later.

Now on to my question...what did everyone do for their yards? We were told that we would have a yard put in by Ryan which they called a stabilization package. Ryan said they would do the grading and plant grass seed, and if we wanted we could upgrade the grass seed for an additional charge but the labor would be free since they were planting seed anyway. So I call the landscaper yesterday and he says what we are getting is in no way a yard, will never be a yard, and we cannot upgrade the seed unless we have 20 yards of top soil brought in and this would cost us 1200 dollars! I understand this may not be a bad deal but 1200 dollars seems like a lot when we were told we could upgrade the seed if we wanted and everything else should be free. I talked with my project manager who had told me from the start that he believed the dirt we had was good enough to plant on and he is putting in a call to the landscaping company(who has not even come out to look at the yard). He advised that we get a soil analysis, so I think this will be our next step. What is everyone else doing?

9 comments:

This seems really really strange. I just had a similar conversation with my sales rep regarding the lot next to mine which is almost finished construction. I was asking him if the grading was just about complete and he said that all that had been done was the backfill piece. They will bring in some more "fill" dirt to make things more level and then will bring in top soil before seeding the lawn. This doesn't seem to be describing what is going on with your yard. If you don't get a decent layer of topsoil then you definitely will not get a decent lawn no matter what type seed you use. Maybe we are just lucky because our development used to be farm land so it's pretty decent soil to start with.

Our neighbors had similar confusion last year. When we moved in we were told we had to figure out the lawn ourselves, but people who settled after the 1st of the year were told they'd get a lawn package but it was really just soil stabilization and grading. I'm surprised they haven't figured out a more clear cut way to communicate this to customers because I know they were getting a lot of calls from my neighbors complaining and questioning what was going on. In my case, we had to wait forever for Ryan to do the final grade of our backyard and they still never got it to our satisfaction. Our backyard was very low by our house and then went uphill and sloped back down again to the field behind our house. There is a drain in our yard and it's not on the edge of the property....it's kind of awkwardly in the middle and they workers kept saying they had to make sure water would drain properly. Unfortunately, it made our already small backyard feel even smaller and like it was not going to be very usable. Luckily, the landscaper we hired suggested adding a 6" concrete riser around the drain to make it higher so that they could level the yard to make it more flat. We ended up being happy with it. Oh and also because Ryan took so long to grade our yard we had to wait to have our lawn seeded until the 1st week in July!! (we closed in Dec. 2009) I would not recommend it! Our lawn actually turned out great, but that's because I'm a stay at home mom and was out watering it and moving sprinklers like crazy all day long for a month! I was known as the water nazi by my neighbors! We only had one faucet on one side of our house so it was impossible to water the whole yard at once and we had to buy really long hoses and move them all around our muddy yard. So to anyone reading this....upgrade and get a second or even third faucet outside (we've since installed a hot and cold line in our garage) WOW, sorry this is such a long comment....maybe I will write a post on my own blog about our lawn experience!

Thanks for the input. The landscapers actually told me Ryan stopped the stabilization package we got just recently. I guess now they have the option of adding a lawn package into their mortgage, which we did not. I went to a lawn and garden place last night and got a soil testing kit. I think it was like 15 dollars and you mail in your soil to the penn. state university for testing. Our PM said this is what one of our neighbors did and then just added whatever the soil was lacking and they never had any top soil brought in. Their yard is actually one of the nicer ones! I'm hoping we can do the same. Hopefully the grading turns out good. I think we may be in the same position as you Natalie...we closed in the beginning of Jan and they have till like June 30th to put the lawn in.

As for the ticket I got....I guess in our town you are not allowed to park on the road from 3-6am without permission. So we came out one morning and my wife and I had parking tickets. I called the police station and they said it was a new guy who apparently didn't know that they let it slide when people are having driveway work done. You would have thought that would be common sense lol. I mean our driveway was roped off with caution tape so you couldn't miss it. Anyway they got rid of the ticket and then I had to request permission to park there for the next week and gave our address and vehicle make and models.

One more thing...we paid just over $1500 and that included the riser for our drain and large beds on the front and sides of our house. You should be able to negotiate down from the original quote with most landscapers.

I think it's pretty standard to add topsoil before seeding a lawn. It is not included in what Ryan does because they are only doing what the EPA requires for soil conservation, not to provide a nice lawn. However, 1200 for topsoil seems excessive unless you have a huge lot. When we had our first lawn put in it was less than 2000 for everything - rock hounding, topsoil and seed - and that was the total cost without Ryan footing part of the bill.

Yeah, I think that includes seed and topsoil. The original seed should be covered by Ryan and rock hounding is also. So the 1200 was for top soil and upgraded seed. No our yard is fairly small only .25 of an acre. I may call other landscaping companies as well to get some estimates.